Design at Your Service by Xenia Viladas

by Xenia Viladas

Service design is a new discipline which allows us to effectively set up an offer consisting of both tangible and intangible elements, through the combined use of methodologies and knowledge which come from design and social sciences. This book examines the rise in service design as a discipline, reviews its main tools and proposes a model where design can give value in each and every one of the phases of a new service developing process. The aim of this text is to at least stimulate interest among members of both companies and entrepreneurs, who hopefully, will have a clear idea of why, how and when a designer can help them improve their business idea after reading this. Also Professional designers, who may see an opportunity for a big future in the design of specialised services.

Genres: Design

Mass Market Paperback

First published May 17, 2011

Reviews

[Mikal · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would rarely review a book this low. As I, like other readers, self-select into the books I read. And in general I self-select with enough care that I don't regret my purchase.

This book doesn't add any meaningful contribution to service design. I have read a number of books on the subject, so I may not be the target reader, but I cannot suggest this book to newcomers to service design because of the sub par conclusions and poor information architecture.

No author would undergo the difficult process of writing a book on this topic, just to present sub par work. So I'm sure the author intended well but a combination of lack of hands-on experience with Service Designers - and what appears to be a lack of 'shadowing' service designers as they do their work, combine to make this book of little value.

Information architecture.
The bullet points used in this book are inline with the paragraph, as with sub-bullet points. the benefits of readability that bullet points offer are lost because the designer puts them inline with paragraph text (using the same line spacing as well)
Furthermore, on the line of bullet points, the author uses an odd mix of short sentence fragments and multiline sentences within the same list grouping. Paragraphs that are poorly structured visually - are as bad as those poorly structured grammatically.
Lastly, the book calls out key points in a large font that actually interrupts the reading flow and detracts from the ability to process the key point.
All of these factors (and others, including hyphenation) combine to make the book more difficult to read than it should be for professionals new to the topic.

Recommendations.
The book closes with these recommendations: 'be-aware of co-creation and don't reject it - embrace it; accept your new role as a mediator' >> when the book only touches on co-creation in passing and it does not discuss the designer as mediator but instead as a contributor to a design process spanning corporate and business functions.
Its recommendation for service companies is to hire designers. I'm not exaggerating that is the first bullet point. The rest are along the lines of 'think beyond the product, think 'experience'.

In general if you heard the phrase "show don't tell"-- this book tells about processes but never shows processes and tells about designing services but never 'shows' service design. In stead I recommend Practical Access to service design available for free, as the best topic on this subject with 'This is Service Design Thinking' as the second best intro to service design http://www.slideshare.net/freazeidea/...

[Doris O · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was left wondering if it was a thesis draft that was published as a book.